I bought an antique scythe

It's a long time since I posted anything, and much longer since I wrote a poem (other than haiku). So this is, I hope, a sign of a return to more writing after a long, dry period.

I bought an antique scythe

I bought an antique two-handed

agricultural scythe. A joke:

I looked as risible as death

in the small shop’s mottled mirror

and remembered through my child’s eyes,

crow-sharp and credulous, watching

two men ecstatically swaying,

to the swing of the wheat as it fell:

an easy labour, not scything

but smoking, talking men’s talk, spitting

on stones. This is no time for grief;

I have lost the loss of the scythe.

The curved snath, weathered and bent round

generations of peasants, tall

as a reaper, the curlew blade

dulled, like history, from disuse.

Eyes never saw what my memory recalled

collaged it from folk song, old film,

willed-dream: mowing is mechanised,

misbeliefs purchased with credit.

I shall scour the sweat from its shaft,

burnish the blade and sheath its edge,

fix it to a wall, exhibition

of beyond recollection or,

more daring, set it over a door

dead-locked against the past;

and accidents.

Through a Glass, Darkly, Jeff Sharlet

This article was published in Harper's magazine, though I first saw it on the Revealer.

I found it a fascinating and well-written and disturbing account of US fundamentalist attitudes which both help show some of the differences between US Christian fundamentalists and other species of fundamentalisms, and some of the features common to the genus.

The article is part of a forthcoming 'narrative history of fundamentalism'. Sharlet seeks to set fundamentalism in American history, and also shows how the fundamentalists re-tell history to ground their own account of the present.

Two (separate) quotes:

'Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god?'

His thesis is that fundamentalists are not newcomers but 'the natural temperature of the nation'.

Later in the article he recounts,

'Rusty and I talked back by the literature tables. He had something he wanted to explain. He had neglected the twin sins, he said, the two wicked acts that fundamentalists believe to be the collective responsibility of the entire society in which they occur. "Child sacrifice"-by which he meant abortion-"and sodomy. Any nation that condoned those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent them from happening? It will be reduced to rubble."

'He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed women to murder their children and men through sodomy to damn themselves and all their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs because he knew the "blueprint of God's Word." '

Those who know God's blueprint are the most dangerous: they are scarcely containable by what other people would call rational means. Nor can they see that they have set up an image of God, a limited version of the Bible, and have made that their God; technically idolatry.

Beowulf

Holiday reading: Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.

It was a tremendous read - I read it out loud (mostly to myself) - a wonderfully powerful account of the hero Beowulf and his three battles against monsters. I loved the idea that Grendal's mum was more dangerous than Grendal himself.

I also enjoyed the glimpses into an other world: of formal boasts, of status based in the capacity to give, of the culture of the mead hall.

I was also intrigued by the Christianity of the writer. It seems a fatalist faith: that God is all-encompassing and nothing happens without God's permission or action. Therefore victory is to those whom God favours. Yet God may equally withdraw his favour - he weaves his war-loom and, as the threads are placed, so goes the outcome of the conflict.

Underneath the story is a background of insecurity and violence which presumably accords well with a fatalist faith. Such security as there is is less in gold than in land - but tenure is not secure. Nor can the hero expect old age and a pension. In a passage Heaney quotes in his introduction:

He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain:
it would soon claim his coffered soul,
part life from limb. Before long
the prince's spirit would spin free from his body.

F.M. Mayor, The Rector's Daughter

I found this book while browsing in a secondhand bookshop. I liked it for it's title (I'd heard of neither author or book before) and for the blurb on the back cover:

It is about love: filial love and married love and extreme sexual passion, and about the anguish, despair and intermittent bliss of every hopeless relationship between man and woman.

It's been a slow read. The book is really about the misery of love thwarted. The old Rector cannot speak his love for his daughter; the daughter has an infatuation based on no more than a brief affection and a kiss. The daughter's love and compassion for her disabled sister wholly ignored by their father. The object of her suppressed passion marries someone else after their own brief infatuation - and they have a very unhappy time until all is reconciled and transformed and they live happily together. The Rector's daughter dies after a 3 week illness.

Mayor writes with a sharp, distinctive style. Many of her paragraphs combine something that happens and comment - often sardonic - on the people concerned. At a rare and awkward tea-party:

There were the Archdeacon and his wife and spoilt daughter with painted lips, impressed at her goodness in coming. Canon Jocelyn [the Rector] thought the bustling Archdeacon was all a clergyman should not be. But the Archdeacon was a successful preacher; his Church of England's men's Society and his Retreats were highly popular. The Archdeacon disliked Canon Jocelyn's superiority; as a member of many more committees, and still in the vigorous years of life, he felt the old man should have looked up to him. In spite of mutual enmity, occasionally each entertained the other.

The book was written in 1924. I enjoyed the slang in the mouths of the County set (e.g. 'cram' for 'tell lies'); and no-one will ever again, surely, call even minor characters Lesbia and Brynhilda. At least, not with a straight face.

Kite Haiku

Primary colours
splash the slate sky; thin strings tie
dun earth to green sea.


Dream kite drank the sky,
ripped my fingers for freedom,
dragged me off my feet.


Unreliable
winds: my kite lifts, loops, crashes,
snaps my hopes in sand.


Picked up. Patched up. Climb
high on a steady breeze:
lift my heart again.


You smile, feint, escape,
soar away. I stand limp-stringed,
dropped, directionless.

Thud

A delightful read - Terry Patchett's Thud is very funny and made me laugh out loud again and again. A depression-buster if ever there was one. How he manages to be so consistently entertaining book after book I have no idea. I take my hat off to him.

Jo's Haiku

Free will or destined?

Oh Pandora’s paradox!

The serpent’s tongue flicks.

Joanna Bagshaw